New No Man’s Sky Trailer Takes A Tour Of The Universe

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In an effort to get people amped up for No Man’s Sky [official site], Hello Games are releasing four “Guides to the Galaxy”. This week we were treated to a brief video showcasing exploration and all of the delights to be had therein.

The trailer estimates that No Man’s Sky will feature 18 quintillion planets with a “limitless variety” of biodiversity. Players will stumble upon worlds with vastly different ecosystems. In the latest video, players shuttle around the universe, uncovering some of these worlds and learning more about the beasts that inhabit them. The critters might be the best part. You can spot odd bi-pedal creatures with an alien, loping gait, be-tusked ice age reptile/mammal hybrids, and fuzzy deer that are just begging for snuggles.

All told, the trailer doesn’t really give us a whole lot of new information about No Man’s Sky. Hello Games are hesitant to go into a lot of detail, as usual. We might be able to glean a bit more in the next few guides, which feature trade, combat and survival. Our own Pip got a brief taste for the game’s explore-y and survive-y bits a few months ago, in case you’re itching to find out more.

No Man’s Sky takes flight on August 9th in North America, the 10th in Europe, and the 12th in the UK.

Some might consider it an act of kindness that you get the final release date…with day 1 patching being as much of a thing as it is now, it might be nice to know that no matter how much crap you have to put up with, it was never more crap than the Yanks who got it three days prior. Right?

I think they have shown most all of the gameplay. Gather resources, upgrade your stuff, fight pirates and hostile creatures that you come across, trade, fly to the next planet. Pirates and creatures get tougher as you get closer to the center of the universe.
I don’t expect there to be much more than that.

Supporting evidence concerning dialect doesn’t prove or disprove any delusionality on your part, but about the phrase in question, yes, it is common in the American South to say such things.
Hopefully you’re not delusional, too! But that is a question far beyond the capabilities of a forum board.

Yeah, that’s the problem with procedural generation, there really isn’t much variation. Oh sure, you can have a lot of technically unique alien worlds and creatures and whatnot, but they’ll all just be uncreative combinations of things you’re familiar with.

It’ll be interesting to compare No Man’s Sky with something like Outer Wilds, which takes the completely opposite approach, a few years from now.

Yeah, the universe’s building blocks are incredibly small, and therefore what can be “procedurally generated” is orders and orders of magnitude more complex and varied than anything a modern game can muster.

And given the multiplatform nature of NMS, I doubt its procedural generators will be anything close to state-of-the-art. Expect bland gameplay systems, planets being “different” by virtue of the colour of their grass/ice/rock and similarly cookie cutter built aliens.

I have absolutely no reason to believe world generation will be significantly different from, say, Starbound’s, which has run into all these problems. And it’s fine, it’s tech limitations. Difference is NMS is boasting about it like it’s some kind of messiah, bringing something to the world that hasn’t in truth been present at least since Minecraft came out.

Blandness is not the fault of procedural generation, it’s the fault of a rubbish model. Reality can create worlds of frozen methane with geysers shooting up to the edge of the atmosphere, gas giants with storms bigger than our planet that have been churning for centuries, volcanoes kept active purely by tidal forces pushing and pulling a molten core. And that’s just Jupiter and its moons.

Reality devoid of human intervention is in fact procedural generation from a certain perspective, isn’t it? In the end everything is simulated productions from a model. It just so happens that reality’s model is much more complex. The reason procedural generation hasn’t worked so well in games so far is that the model is not complex enough, not because reality was hand-designed by a sentient being.

Hush with your valid scepticism about actual gameplay. BAJILLION planets! and aliens and stuff! That seems like the consensus on the hypetrain in a nutshell. Procedurally generated content has been around for a while now, I’m not really impressed by numbers like that anymore.

This game reminds me of the Spore release, I will not be fooled again. Definitely waiting for reviews.

Why aren’t you hyped yet? You should be hyped! HYYYPED! Spend that cash! Pre-order that shit! Pre-order the deluxe edition! What, you wanna know if it’s any actual good before you give the publisher your money?

FUCK THAT NOISE. Watch the trailers with their tiny, broken up snippets of what might be gameplay. Are you not convinced yet?

In the grimdark future of hype, there will be only pre-orders and season passes…

Yeah at the moment, before I’ve seen any reviews, I’m thinking this is a “maybe” at $30 and a “definitely not” at $60. I mean for comparison Minecraft is currently $30, and it’s a game in a similar vein that we know is good.

To be fair, the assets for Minecraft require a lot less manpower than what is on display here. Doesn’t mean you should pay a price you don’t think is worth it, but developers need to put food on the table too.

Agreed. I think that some people have this idea that if a game is not basically Life 2.0, it’s not worth the asking price. Toilets? we have working toilets! I mean come on man it’s a video game! It’s not going to be this life-changing event that you end up living in. I really don’t understand this whole “Bah! I’ll only pay 30 for this thing they worked on for five years and are asking 60 for!” mentality. Is 60 bucks really going to put you down that much? These guys poured years of their lives to creating something for entertainment purposes and because it doesn’t do a, b, or c you’re not going to give them but half of what they are asking for the experience? Really…

Thank you. As a game developer, both studio and indie, I can not abhor this kind of attitude enough. A team of passionate people spend multiple years working 80+ hour weeks on their dream project they want to unleash on the world, only to be met with disgust when they ask for the price of a night out for hundreds of potential hours of entertainment.

The effort the developers put into a game (or book, or movie, etc..) is irrelevant to the worth of the game to me as a consumer. My wife spends 40+ hours making a single quilt and when she asks $200 for it people choke on their drink. After the cost of materials she’s making maybe $2 an hour. She could spend her time being insulted by it, but she understands that paying $200 for a blanket is not worth it to most people.

Whether you spent X years and Y hours a week on it doesn’t give the product intrinsic value to a potential customer. Not to mention the fact in many cases, if you were working for someone else, you weren’t working all those hours for free.

It’s different for the lonely guy or two who are making their game, investing their own money to make their dream come true. But then I haven’t really seen good games fail because people refused to buy them. If after all that effort the game doesn’t sell well, maybe it wasn’t all that good to begin with.

It’s nice that you’re being considerate of others’ work, but you’re ignoring a whole other side of the economy: The payers’ time.

Money is an (under-)representation of a person’s time, given as work. If you take the various organizations’ “value of a person” seriously, almost nobody in the world is getting paid enough for their time.

When you buy something, you’re essentially bartering your life for theirs, and this is why people make value assessments. Developers aren’t the only ones trading their lives for money.

If a game company spends years of their lives making a product that people don’t want to pay for, there’s nothing sensible about shaming the consumer. If anything, it’s more the fault of the developer(s) for various reasons, whether it be pride or hubris, market ignorance, lack of self-criticality, or the “we’ve gone too far to turn back” mentality. See: Wildstar

Remember when MMO games could always command a subscription fee, but now they can’t? It’s not some degenerative decline in the morality of gamers; it’s simply that the MMO market is more competitive now, so games either need to have a killer edge to command a subscription, or rely on other methods to attract players (e.g. F2P/B2P models).

In short, no, $60 is not a lot to pay for a game. But this one game doesn’t exist in an absolute vacuum; video games are a cutthroat market, and the question people are actually asking is: “Will spending $60 on this game be more enjoyable than spending $60 elsewhere?”

And no, there is no one answer for that. It’s going to depend on individual tastes, and only time will tell if the game will be as popular as the developers hope.

Yes, “developers need to put food on the table,” but games are a risky business. Not everyone’s cut out for it, and not everyone can (and should) assume the risk of being an indie dev. People can play the pity card, but in the end, economics will win.

That’s why I’m probably waiting for the Steam sale on this one. It really looks like there isn’t that much to do, especially if you want combat. Also it seems like planets reset so you never leave your mark anywhere.

Maybe if the reviews are stellar and go into more detail on play styles, I might bite.

With you on this. It looks good on paper, but I’ve played enough procedural games to know that algorithms don’t usually offer limitless possibilities. I also haven’t seen enough to convince me it has enough depth to make exploring world after world interesting. That’s where it will succeed or fail.

There’s been enough gameplay videos I’m fairly confident I’ve got a decent grasp of what the general gameplay is like moment to moment. I’m curious to discover the nature of the long-game goals: the language translation for instance. I’m also wondering how entertaining it will be to be stuck between killing some giant beast out to eat me and avoiding raising my wanted level. I usual enjoy those kinds of rock and a hard place toss-ups even if it means I end up getting eaten by monsters or vaporized by robo space cops. I’m also looking forward to really screwing with stuff by digging holes.

I’m pretty sure the central goal is a race to the centre of the universe. I remember the developer mentioning this a couple of times in earlier videos. Supposedly, it’ll take a long time to do this, for even the most dedicated player.

Extra things I’ve seen and read about not mentioned in article is the language system.

You find “glyphs” which will teach you words so you can better converse with the various lifeforms you will enter on your epic journey. This will make it easier to negotiate trade, or you may simply have no experience with the language and backtrack when you learn more.

I’m truly excited because many an open world game I’ve played has quietly dropped neat features and story elements not hinted at in trailers and gameplay videos. Ya know, finding stuff in game that bring big/pleasant surprises (maybe my expectations are always low? Hah!).

Honestly. I’d pay money just to experience exploring this stuff as a walking space opera simulator.

considering the stylised art style of the game, I think it would be unrealistic to expect any major differences between versions. Maybe a few extra resolutions or visual effects, but then again, maybe not.

That’s sorta the new trend right? And it makes sense when everything is pre-ordered, kickstarted, and early-access. A good demo and a lot of promises sells the player the version of the game they imagine, instead of what the developer can actually produce.

Most procedural content does after a while. As humans we’re very good at noticing patterns and similarities. That’s why the game needs interesting systems and goals to keep you hooked. I haven’t seen enough evidence of the latter, so I’m sceptical at this point.

Soo.. few different biomes with some variety, focused on exploring cause we have 18 quintillion planets, and I am pretty sure most of them will look pretty much same.
Fingers crossed, but every time I see some news about this game, I have that feeling that this is going to be huge borefest after couple of hours. Or maybe I am just not right customer.

I generally love exploring, but the footage of No Man’s Sky we’ve seen so far doesn’t make me want to venture into that universe. It doesn’t summon that feeling of excitement and wonder for some reason.

It’s not clear from the article you linked whether the update retroactively removes the access permissions by itself, or simply prevents the issue from affecting new users. It’s still worth checking your google settings to see which apps have full access.

I’ve allowed myself to get incredibly excited for this game, so there’s a certain gut drive to feel personally offended at the skepticism about it and to be tribalised by the hype. I’m certainly not the only one, and there’s some really intense polarisation of opinion around it.

Ultimately, though, it’s less than four weeks away. At this point, the people who shrug indifferently at it aren’t going to have their minds changed by anything but the reviews, while those who are shaking with anticipation for the next of the three pre-launch trailers pre-ordered the game months ago. In four weeks, everyone with an opinion on it will either be validated or will eat their words. I choose to spend the time just quietly looking forward to it.

Hype is best mixed in the company of others. Roughly mix in Pre-Purchase and beat and stir until frothy at the mouth. Ensure Pre-Purchase offers no significant benefits to ensure maximum disappointment.

Add a touch of Post-Hoc Buyer Rationalization to taste.

For best results, Pre-Purchase as early as possible. Some may argue that you get the exact same game for the same price even after the game launches, but the true taste of Delicious Disappointment cannot be experienced this way!

No Man’s Sky has sat on my wish list for over a year. I virtually never pre-order games, certainly not a month in advance. I pre-ordered No Man’s Sky.

Why? Well, No Man’s Sky original selling feature was a seamless space to ground movement engine with Minecraft levels of freedom. That one feature is pretty unusual, you’ll find it in StarMade and…? However, as progress on No Man’s Sky continued, the developers outdid themselves by adding an amazing fauna procedural generation engine.

Will it be a game? I have no idea. But, as a technical achievement, I’ve no doubt it’s worth my preorder dollars.

The world space is undeniably huge, so how much of what we do in it will be remembered and possibly shared with other players. We know we get to name things that we discover, but that’s it.

We know we can harvest resources from planets, but will those resources respawn for us? If another player visits the same location, after we strip-mine it, will they find a stripped location or will it be as untouched as we found it, only with named plants and animals?

We know there will be space battles we can come across and help decide the battle if we choose. If another player visits that location later will just the victors be there or will they encounter the same battle, just about to start, as we saw?

In some ways you can. If you discover a planet or a creature, you can name it and add it to the galactic index. It will bear that name forever (or at least until the universe ends) and other players coming across it will know that you discovered it first.

You won’t really be able to leave a physical mark on the game, however, at least not on the universe at large. As you travel to new planets, they are generated around you, and when you leave them, they degenerate. So, if you use a mining tool to blast a section of a planet, perhaps to draw a giant penis on the ground (I will just assume that is what you will do), once you leave that planet and fly away, the game will once again disassemble the planet behind you.

This is probably the saddest and most disappointing thing I’ve read about the game. Ugh. Other than labels, no permanent mark? I understand the difficulties and technology needed to store and keep that info, and that fact that there would be a lot of penis-planets out there, but……

That’s kinda lame. I still have fond memories of the MMOs of yore when you’d have one persistent server and no sharding. Seems like you rarely get that experience anymore in the various forms it could take.

I am trying not to avoid too many spoilers, but this I have to ask. Will this one be an online-only gankfest simulator as well? That comment about other players being able to see the name you gave to a planet seems to point in that direction, yet for some reason I am crossing my fingers…

You can play the game offline, but anything you name won’t show up in other players’ games until you log in. Obviously, you won’t see other players either, but the multiplayer interactions are pretty limited, and given the size of the planets and universe, you’re not likely to ever see anyone anyways.